Article Marketing

I don't personally do article marketing, but in many threads in many forums it is still put forward as an important part of SEO. I find this confusing, because when I hear what Matt Cutts says and what the likes of SEOmoz write, and other comments I see about how this has been devalued by Panda, it seems that it is something that is no longer recommended.
Have all these people (who enthusiastically say how great article marketing still is) got it wrong, or am I misunderstanding all the information I have been seeing?

Actually the term Article Marketing is many a times used in a broader sense in forums. Many users use the term Article marketing for guest posting, ezines and everything and so forums is not the right source of information for lot of things.

Apart from that those articles saying how great is article marketing may be old as well.

Now coming back to the point of article marketing it works for lot of bloggers if you can make a guest post on other authority blogs because it not only helps in links but also helps in traffic from those blogs.

My experience with article marketing is horrible.I have tried few timew but failed miserably each time because I always believe that the best content should be always on my site and not on such crap ezines and so those ezines always have the content of those articles which I have actually rejected to be suitable on my site and so probably I never had success with it.

To be very honest I am giving it one more try recently to see how things pan out.

It is most often just referred to as "article submission" when I see it mentioned in forums, and it was seeing yet another posting today saying it was the best thing to do that prompted me to start this thread.
I did try it early on but also abandoned it for the same reasons, i.e. I want to keep my own content.
I don't share it, nor do I use anyone else's (with the exception of some data which I can't produce myself).
I'm not good at writing blogs, mainly because I don't have the patience

I'm not good at writing blogs, mainly because I don't have the patience

When I started go4expert.com in 2004, I also thought I could not blog because I was doing a job as well as having a site and so decided against a blog and started a forum. You can read about that here.

In 2007 I started Financial blog because at that time I was light on task from job and so thought I can make a blog happen and now I blog once a week and it is one of those blog that is working really well.

So I think you don't need to do anything differently and blog when you have something nice to say, you can blog about it.

Article marketing always been considered for search engine ranking position benefits and that is an actual problem with it. The fact is very few people write for users not for search engines. I think, those tips on the Internet about “content and seo” misguided a lot of people and as a result websites like Ezine now seems like a junkyard of articles.

However some high PR article directories already changed their old approach and included new rules that clearly mention “post your unique content which is not published elsewhere” or something like that.

But whether you publish article on such kind of directories or in your own blog, if you don't promote them individually by using various ways then it won't attract actual readers attention.

Article writing is still a good SEO techinique until you are providing good and original content.

But why would you publish it elsewhere instead of on your own site? When I look at the first site in your signature, you have a blog there but the last entry was February 14, 2011.
If you are publishing articles elsewhere but then a visitor goes to your site and the blog hasn't been added to for over a year, surely that doesn't help you very much?
I am not criticizing that your blog isn't up do date, but if you are doing article writing as your post implies, just querying why you would give preference to your content appearing on other sites?

Ok I can understand your reasoning, but my point is if visitors have been impressed by your content on other sites, isn't there the risk that when they get to your site and don't find more of the same they will become unimpressed?